Feminist Baking: Hanging up the apron

I’ve decided to stop making Feminist Baking videos. There are no dramatic reasons: no internet bullying, no office politics. I just want to try new things and I don’t have sufficient drive to keep going with this as well.

Thank you to Jess Kitrick, Holly Christine Brown and all the wonderful women at CirclePlus for including me. It’s been a great experience and I’m very sad never to have met any of you in person! The tragedy of living an ocean away on a student budget.

Since I was making very loud and clearly labelled feminist content online, I suppose a farewell message should include some observations from my time as The Feminist Baker. Firstly, I got nasty messages, as was expected. It did hurt sometimes and sometimes the illogic of commenter’s arguments would anger me, but most of the time it was amusing. Seeing the weird things people had written made me think it was worth continuing to make videos, because perhaps I might be a drop in the feminist ocean that would eventually change one person’s mind. Secondly, people do not give much slack online. In several videos I highlighted the length of my videos, how I couldn’t possibly cram the complexity of an issue into fifteen minutes, especially when I was trying to entertain as well as educate. Regardless, I would be berated for failing to mention x, y and z. *Sigh. My basic point – this was hard work.

Those were the frustrations, but I also had a great deal of fun researching topics, framing my thoughts, coming up with jokes and the whole filming and editing process. I have no idea if my videos ever had any impact on anyone, aside from distracting them from The Void for a couple of quarter hours. I like to think that I at least entertained a few people, maybe made a few people think, vindicated them on beliefs they already had, or helped them find the language to express their own arguments. I certainly hope I got some people to read Lunatic Fringe by Allison Moon! If I achieved any of those things, then the experience will have been worth it.

Thank you to anyone who ever watched, even the ones who screamed abuse. You know if you watch it and comment on it, you’re just increasing my view total, right?